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Most of us don't learn a lot about Central American civilisations at school;
大部分英国人在上学时都没怎么学习过中美洲文明。
we're all taught about the Parthenon, and we've all heard of Confucius as a great Chinese thinker,
我们可能学过帕台农神庙和孔子，
but we don't know a lot about the great civilisations occurring at the same time in Central America.
但并不怎么了解在同一时期出现在中美洲的伟大文明。
Yet the Olmecs were a highly sophisticated people, who built the first cities in Central America, mapped the heavens, developed the first writing and probably evolved the first calendar there.
奥尔梅克人拥有极高的智慧，他们修建中美洲最早的城市，绘制了天文图，发明了当地最旱的文字，并很可能创制了当地的历法。
They even invented one of the world's earliest ball games-which the Spanish would encounter about three thousand years later.
他们甚至还发明了世界上最早的球类游戏之一，西班牙人要在三千年后才首次接触它。
It was played using rubber balls-rubber being readily available from the local tropical gum trees-and although we don't know what the Olmecs called themselves, it's documented that the Aztecs called them Olmen, meaning 'the rubber country'.
游戏使用的是橡胶球，而橡胶取自当地的热带橡胶树。尽管我们并不知道奥尔梅克人如何自称，但有记录显示，阿玆特克人称他们为奥尔曼人，奥尔曼，即“橡胶之国”。
It's only relatively recently that Olmec civilisation was uncovered from the jungles of Mexico;
从墨西哥丛林中发现奥尔梅克文明的时间并不算长。
it was after the First World War that their sites, their architecture and above all their sculptures were found and investigated.
一战后，人们才陆续找到他们的遗址、建筑和雕像，开始研究。
Finding out when the Olmecs lived took even longer.
人们花了更长的时间才确定了他们生活的时代。
In the 1950s radiocarbon dating came in, and that allowed archaeologists to date the buildings and therefore the people that lived in them.
二十世纪五十年代，放射性碳定年法出现，考古学家才最终确定了那些建筑的兴建时间，从而估算出居民生活的年代。
The results showed that this great civilisation flourished about three thousand years ago.
结果显示，这一伟大文明繁盛于三千年前。
The discovery of this ancient and long-standing culture has had a profound effect on the cultural identity of Mexicans today.
这一古老而悠久的文明的发现，对墨西哥人的民族认同产生了深远影响。
We asked the celebrated Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes what it means to him.
我曾问墨西哥著名作家卡洛斯?富恩特斯，这一发现对他有何意义。
